President's Visit to Mexico - May 2 2013; Costa Rica

Adelante · **Posted:** Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:57 pm

Quote:

U.S. Image Rebounds in Mexico

Survey Report

On the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Mexico, the United States is enjoying a resurgence of good will among the Mexican public, with a clear majority favorably inclined toward their northern neighbor and more now expressing confidence in Obama.

A national opinion survey of Mexico by the Pew Research Center, conducted March 4-17 among 1,000 adults, finds that roughly two-thirds (66%) of Mexicans have a favorable opinion of the U.S. – up from 56% a year ago and dramatically higher than it was following the passage of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law in 2010, when favorable Mexican attitudes toward the United States slipped to 44%.

Obama also receives higher ratings than he did in recent years. About half (49%) of Mexicans express confidence in the American president to do the right thing when it comes to world affairs, compared with 42% who said the same in 2012 and 38% in 2011. Still, Mexicans’ confidence in Obama has yet to return to the level in his first days in office in 2009, when 55% gave him a high rating.

Mexicans are also now more of the view that the U.S. takes their country’s interests into account when deciding international policy. About half (51%) say Washington considers their country’s interests, while 45% say it does not. In 2012, opinion leaned in the opposite direction – 56% said the U.S. did not consider Mexico’s interests, compared with 40% who said it did.

Bilateral issues, particularly the deepening of economic and commercial relations between the U.S. and Mexico, are expected to be among the key items on the agenda when Obama meets with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto this week. The survey finds that, overall, 70% of Mexicans consider the deep economic ties between the two countries to be good for Mexico, down slightly from 76% in 2009, when Pew Research last asked this question.

Foggy · **Posted:** Tue Apr 30, 2013 4:13 pm

Pew Global

Quote:

U.S. Image Rebounds in Mexico

Bilateral issues, particularly the deepening of economic and commercial relations between the U.S. and Mexico, are expected to be among the key items on the agenda when Obama meets with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto this week.

They'd better discuss another topic, too. I don't give a dang if they make it public, but by gum they'd better talk about drug policy, too also, dammit. [-X

Get's mah blood boilin'. :angry:

Mexico Is Ready to End Failed Drug-War Policies—Why Isn't the U.S.?

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic

Quote:

Did you know that the U.S. has been operating surveillance drones in Mexico, providing air support for the Mexican military, tracking the movements of Mexican citizens, sharing state-of-the-art spy technology with Mexican officials, and sending CIA agents to help Mexico train drug informants? Did you know the DEA has more employees stationed in Mexico than any of its other foreign posts? That Mexican nationals trained and bankrolled by the CIA raid Mexican drug cartels? Or that the CIA runs high-tech "fusion centers" in Mexico City, Monterrey and elsewhere?

"For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have put aside their tension-filled history on security matters to forge an unparalleled alliance against Mexico's drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning," Dana Priest reports in the Washington Post. "But now, much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy." Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexico's new leader, reportedly dislikes the status quo, and was shocked, on taking office this December, at the degree of United States involvement in his country ... the period of maximum American involvement has coincided with a horrific spike in drug-related violence.

"Meanwhile," Priest continues, "the drug flow into the United States continued unabated. Mexico remains the U.S. market's largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine." So the strategy was high cost, low reward. It increased violence and did nothing to reduce the drug supply.

Yet the fact that it completely failed plays basically no role in the rest of the article, in large part because everyone in the United States government apparently wants to preserve the failed status quo. American officials are very upset that Mexico's new leader has decided to go his own way.

Foggy · **Posted:** Tue Apr 30, 2013 4:29 pm

Here's the Dana Priest piece in the Washington Post:

U.S. role at a crossroads in Mexico’s intelligence war on the cartels

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By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace throughout Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanged from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers. Ciudad Juarez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone.

Obama approved an intensification of bilateral measures. Deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan, also in charge of counterterrorism operations focused on al-Qaeda, led the U.S. side ...

By late 2010 ... Mexican authorities had grown so enamored with drones that they were requesting more flights than the United States could deliver ...

In a visit to Washington two weeks ago, Mexico’s top security team shared the broad outlines of the plan with U.S. agencies, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. It contains many changes.

DaveMuckey · **Posted:** Wed May 01, 2013 2:38 pm

Foggy wrote:

Here's the Dana Priest piece in the Washington Post:

U.S. role at a crossroads in Mexico’s intelligence war on the cartels

Quote:

By 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, horrific scenes had become commonplace throughout Mexico: severed heads thrown onto a dance floor, a half-dozen bodies hanged from a bridge, bombs embedded in cadavers. Ciudad Juarez, a stone’s throw from El Paso, was a virtual killing zone.[/size]

This was going on long before 2009. When I lived in El Paso (1973-76) you could get a guy offed for $100. Even then, Juarez was not for the casual explorer.

Adelante · **Posted:** Wed May 01, 2013 4:16 pm

It seemed to me the big change came in 2008, when reported deaths doubled and spread all over the country. It's been up, up and away since. But nobody really knows. You see numbers ranging from 15,000 to 60,000 to 150,000 dead. Between the narcos suppressing the press through fear and murder of journalists and the current PRI government suppressing the press by refusing to release specifics at all, it's anybody's guess. Statistics taken from Calderon's time were only the ones they could identify. They couldn't count, for instance, bodies melted in acid baths or mass graves out in no man's land. Pena Nieto's government has generally resisted issuing statistics, (or names of narcos arrested or what cartel they are associated with), though the national statistical institute has released a few reports. Nobody believes the numbers. Who would?

The only killings the Mexican press will cover now are the ones that take place in such a public fashion that social media publicizes them and the newspapers can't ignore them. Recently, in a lovely state capital right in the centro, for example, 700 shots are fired into a bar, lasting about a half hour. The city is full of cops and military, right there, literally minutes away from the scene, who didn't show up until it was all over and the shooters had time to collect their bodies and escape. It took almost the whole of the next day, after YouTube videos taken by nearby citizens spread far and wide, before the newspapers posted a word about it, reporting a single death from 700 bullets. Then you have locals counting 78 bodies in an incident in some town, while the press reports two bodies. The whole thing is crazy when you're talking about criminals who can kidnap, murder and dismember an entire 18-piece orchestra. Well, 17, because one got away.

Currently, the war is for territory, and to dominate a global business, so legalizing drugs in the US may be a fine idea, but it means something less than it used to. Probably the PRI will strike a deal with one cartel to lay off the civilians, if they haven't already struck that deal, and faciliate the disappearance of the competition. A complication is that it's not just drugs anymore. The cartels and subsidiary gangs have gotten into everybody's pockets. If you're a taxi driver and don't want to kick back, you're dead. If you sell ears of corn on a corner and don't want to kick back, you're dead. If you're an honest cop and want to stay that way, you're dead or your family's dead. If they want your house for something they take it. If they want your children, they take them. If you are an engineer or scientist, they will kidnap and imprison you to do the work they want done. It's all so huge and deep, any proposed solutions seem like chimera.

Falsehoods unchallenged only fester and grow.

President's Visit to Mexico - May 2 2013; Costa Rica

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